Making the decision to buy a color printer should not be taken lightly. Since color printers have come way down in cost a lot of companies have decided to purchase a color printer for printing brochures, flyers, pass out material, graphs an unlimited number of reasons. However, the cost of printing color documents in your office is very expensive. Cost per page ranging from 5 cents to well over 12 cents per page compared to printing in black and white, which is typically ¾ cent per page to 1½ cents per page. No doubt printing in color makes the impact of the printed document appear to be so much better than just plain black and white. In most cases from my experience and from talking to people that own color printers is that they only need color documents 3% to 5% of the time. The problem I see as a printer technician is that a lot of people print documents that should not be in color, not realizing the expense of such documents. The way to evaluate the piece you are about to print is consider the expense versus the impact you are trying to create. While I’m in some accounts servicing their printers I see a lot of color documents that are internal documents that will never be seen by their clientele, so obviously, those documents should be printed in black and white—no impact needed for internal documents. I recommend to most of my customers they should have a local or convenience laser printer for black and white printing and have a networked group color laser printer for the few times they actually need color documents.
Using a color laser printer cost even when you print in black and white. Most people are not aware that using a color printer when just printing black and white is actually using some of the other colors to produce the different shades of black. Producing black and white prints on color printers also uses up the life of the other consumables such as the fuser units, drums or photo receptors, and transfer belts. If your thinking that if I use a black and white laser printer that I am still using those consumables– you would be correct, but the cost of those consumable items are a lot less expensive to replace then the ones used in a color laser printer.
The big question now is how much color printing do you really do?
Article provided by Douglas Walley, Toner Concepts.
www.tonerconcepts.com
doug@lasersun.com
